Douglas Coupland: A Highly Inappropriate Tale – in pictures

Douglas Coupland: A Highly Inappropriate Tale – in pictures

Coupland's latest book, Highly Inappropriate Tales for Young People, tells seven contemporary fairytales, with illustrations by Graham Roumieu. This is an abridged version of the first tale in the book, Donald, the Incredibly Hostile Juice Box

Tue 1 Nov 2011 07.48 EDT
First published on Tue 1 Nov 2011 07.48 EDT

Donald was a juice box with a terrible attitude.Illustration: Graham Roumieu

Out of nowhere, he'd whale on the other juice boxes, slamming them with plastic lunchroom trays and puncturing their sacred tinfoil puncture holes with bobby pins he swiped from the girls who sat at the popular girls' table.Illustration: Graham Roumieu

After lunch hour, when the cafeteria staff held respectful farewell ceremonies for all the juice boxes that had donated their nectar to the student body that day, Donald would run around the kitchen looking for things to throw into the deep fryer ... As far as Janitor Schwinn was concerned, Donald should have been buried in the recycling bins months back. But in the end, it took a truly fiendish deed to get Donald expelled from the school.Illustration: Graham Roumieu

You see, Donald was obsessed with getting other juice boxes squished beneath the wheels of cars coming out of the teachers' parking lot ... There was something about watching hundreds of pounds of pressure from a moving vehicle blow out the bottoms of his fellow juice boxes that made Donald crazy - crazy for
destruction.Illustration: Graham Roumieu

He'd lure his juice box targets out to the teachers' parking lot by telling them lies. For example, he told one box that he'd heard of a new type of drinking straw that allows a person to drink without puncturing the foil hole on the top. It was a silly lie, but juice boxes are pretty stupid, and luring them to the scene of their deaths was never difficult.Illustration: Graham Roumieu

Once Donald had snagged a box, he'd position his victim on the south side of the big speed bump where the teachers' lot exits onto the main road ... while the juice box was waiting for a non-existent straw, Donald would hop up onto a traffic cone and do something to distract the teachers driving out of the lot ... sometimes he'd throw little metal stars made by the guys in shop class who smoked out behind the asbestos storage bins ...Illustration: Graham Roumieu

One day after math class, Donald was walking around removing chewing gun from beneath chairs and putting it up on the seats when he overheard the teacher, Miss Burnside, on her cellphone screaming at someone from an online dating website. Something had to be wrong with their service, she said, because she hadn't had a nibble in months ...Illustration: Graham Roumieu

... From there, she went on a rant about her life in general, then she lashed into her students, saying how cow-like and stupid they were ... She wanted out of her life, but didn't know how to do it. That was when Miss Burnside saw Donald, hiding behind a trash can. She went running after him, but it was too late: Donald had seen her true self, and she knew that soon he would begin to torment her.Illustration: Graham Roumieu